Painter Andrew Wyeth died yesterday morning in his sleep at the Wyeth family estate in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware at age 91.

At the news of his death, many artists rushed to pay their respects, still it seems that Wyeth is bound to remain a controversial figure forever and after, since there are some who refuse to acknowledge his talent and genius.

Kathleen A. Foster, the senior curator of American art and director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated that opinions of Andrew Wyeth are and will be torn between considering him a great artist and one who never managed to cross the line from corny to exquisite.

On one hand, people who admire Wyeth’s works find that his paintings have a sombre charge, a bleak twist that renders them insightful and deep, able to grasp the very core of America, to foray into the beauty and peculiarity of a landscape that often escape the untrained eye.

On the other hand, his opponents, including the dean of the Yale University School of Art Rob Storr, praise him only as a technician, dismissing the importance of the subject of his paintings, saying that neither his style nor his works changed over the years.

Moreover, they deem him as a conservatory man who could never understand that he was standing still in a world that was constantly undergoing change and believe that the only thing that  characterized him was the energy and conviction he displayed while doing so.